With the government reopening, the dubious panel of vaccine advisors selected by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is wasting no time getting back to dismantling the federal childhood vaccine schedule.
A meeting that was scheduled for October but put on hold during the shutdown has already been rescheduled for December 4 and 5. A Federal Register notice Thursday said that the meeting will “include discussions on vaccine safety, the childhood and adolescent immunization schedule, and hepatitis B vaccines.” The announcement was light on information beyond that but indicated that there would be a vote on hepatitis B vaccines.
The panel—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—is typically composed of preeminent, extensively vetted vaccine experts. But, in June, Kennedy summarily fired all 17 experts on the panel and installed 12 new members, almost all of whom are questionably qualified and espouse anti-vaccine views.
In the most recent meeting in September, the panel had planned to vote on altering the current recommendations for hepatitis B vaccinations but then abruptly abandoned the plan after they realized that the proposed recommendation made no sense and was not based on data.
First try
Hepatitis B vaccines are administered in three doses: the first on the day of birth, the second at 1 to 2 months, and the third between 6 and 18 months. The vaccine protects against a serious liver infection that, when acquired early in life, almost always becomes chronic, leading to liver disease and cancers. With a dose at birth, doctors close any window in which babies are vulnerable to the highly infectious virus, which can be spread from people who don’t know they have it. About 2.4 million people in the US are infected, and about 50 percent aren’t aware of their infection.
Adam Langer, acting principal deputy director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention, presented a ream of data at the September meeting. He noted that there are no significant safety concerns about the vaccine, including the birth dose.